IT’S ALL IN THE BRAIN

CLOZE TEST

Read the text and complete the chart below with a word from the list that comes after the text. Every word can only be used ONCE. There are NINE words that you do not need to use. Question 0 has been answered as an example.

IT’S ALL IN THE BRAIN

We can recognize a friend 0) ___________—full-face, in profile, or even by the back of his head. We can distinguish millions of 1) ___________ of color, as well as 10,000 smells. We can feel a feather as it brushes our skin, hear the faint rustle of a leaf. It all seems so 2) __________: we open our eyes or ears and let the world stream in.

“You can think of sensory systems as little 4) __________ that generate hypotheses about the world,” says Anthony Movshon, a researcher at New York University. Where did that sound come from? What colour is this, really? The brain makes an educated 5) __________, based on the information at hand and on some simple assumptions.

When you look at the illustration to the right, for instance, you see an X made of spheres surrounded by cavities. But if you turn the image 6) __________ down, all the cavities become spheres, and vice versa. In each case, the shapes seem real because “your brain assumes there is a single light source—and that this light comes from above,” says Vilayanur Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. As he 7) __________ out, this is a good rule of thumb in our sunlit world.

To resolve 8) __________ and make sense of the world, the brain also creates shapes from incomplete data, Ramachandran says. He likes to show an apparent triangle that was developed by the Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa. If you 9) __________ part of this picture, depriving the brain of certain clues it uses to form conclusions, the large white triangle disappears.

We construct such images 10) __________ and very rapidly. Our brains are just as fertile when we use our other senses. In moments of anxiety, for instance, we sometimes “hear things” that are not really there. But suppose a leopard approached, half-hidden in the jungle—then our ability to make patterns out of incomplete sights, sounds, or smells could save our lives.